Thomas Cochrane

Thomas Cochrane (14 December 1775-31 October 1860) was a British flag officer of the Royal Navy and a politician. He was also a military adventurer, serving Great Britain, Chile, Brazil, Peru, and Greece during several wars in the early 1800s.

Biography
Cochrane was the son of Archibald Cochrane and a nephew of Alexander Cochrane, and was an ethnic Scot. Cochrane enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1793 in the French Revolutionary Wars although his father had purchased a commission for him in the British Army. In 1801, a French royal officer mistook him for a common sailor in a dress ball on Malta and Cochrane wounded the man in a gun duel, his only one.

In 1814 he was arrested during the Great Stock Exchange Fraud after years of service as a naval hero during the Napoleonic Wars and left Great Britain in disgrace in 1818. In December, at the request of Bernardo O'Higgins, he became a Chilean citizen when he arrived in Valparaiso, and he took command of the new Chilean Navy. He failed to take the Chiloe Archipelago but raided Peru as he had previously done in France and Spain in the Napoleonic Wars.

In 1823 he took charge of the Brazilian Navy during the war against the Kingdom of Portugal and defeated the Portuguese in open sea near Salvador in Bahia, Brazil, on 4 May 1823. Later that year he crushed a rebellion in Maranhao and sacked the city, taking all the money from the public funds and sacking merchant ships. He took a captured Brazilian frigate and defied Brazilian orders to remain in the country, leaving on 10 November 1825.

From 1827 to 1828 Cochrane fought in the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Navarino, the decisive battle of the war. In 1831 he became Earl of Dundonald following his father's death and in 1847 Queen Victoria reinstated him as Knight of the Bath. In 1860 he died in the second of two kidney stone operations.